Last fall I chatted with writer-director Jim Mickle about his cannibal-family horror film We Are What We Are. As we discussed the style of that film, Mickle (who comes off incredibly nice and intellectually and artistically curious) mentioned that his next film was set in the ’80s and had a very different, more neon, visual […]

Most Americans know English artist Ralph Steadman through the splatter-mad satiric illustrations he did for Hunter S. Thompson’s books and articles, most famously 1971′s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. That was certainly the case with me when I attended a Steadman (splatter) signing in London in 1986. But from there I came to love […]

When you interview someone for an arts piece, there are numerous competing agendas at play, including: 1) What you, the interviewer, personally want to know, are curious about. 2) What you think is important for others to know. 3) What the average reader would probably find the most interesting, what will make the interview “pop.” […]

At a time when we’re about to be overrun for the season by loud, dumb, nonsensical, pointless action bloat at the box office, a small, quiet, brutal film like Blue Ruin reminds us why genre still matters. Funded on Kickstarter, Blue Ruin shows how something as simple and familiar as a rural revenge story can […]

As an actor, John Turturro grabbed attention in the ’90s in films by Spike Lee (Do the Right Thing, Mo’ Better Blues, Jungle Fever, Clockers, He Got Game, Girl 6, Summer of Sam, She Hate Me, and Miracle at St. Anna) and the Coen Brothers (Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, The Big Lebowski, and O Brother, […]

There’s always the danger with reductionist film making that sticking with a single character and/or  location–as in films like Castaway, Phone Booth, and Buried–will come off as more of a stunt than an actual film. That’s certainly not the case in writer-director Steven Knight’s new film Locke, starring Tom Hardy as Ivan Locke, an ordinary […]